Basically, I just took some time to sit down and talk with her. Spent about a week with her on vacation. Talked about a lot of things.
Specifically though, if I had to hone it down to something I think it was when I connected the dots for her about how Facebook really works. She'd thought it was more of a "place I can put stuff where friends could reliably get to it." A sort of classified ad as a service as it were I think is how we boiled down her understanding of it.
Then she had said she kept getting flustered because people she didn't know kept popping up in her feed.
That's when I explained to her that Facebook wasn't like a passive paper. They were actively utilizing any data she made available to them to expand their network, to the point of actively putting her information in front of people she hadn't even met, and may very well not care to.
Then I explained to her the whole "Big Data" thing. Basically how more and more, things one would just do were being made in ways that they generated data trail that businesses would sell to other businesses. There was no such thing as professional discretion anymore.
She really didn't like that and honestly never realized that that sort of thing happened. She knew they were a valuable company, but didn't realize it was because they were selling access to the user base.
Talked to her a bit about the history of the company, and it's CEO's more controversial statements, and connected those with a couple of personal experiences I've had fighting to "do the right thing" in the industry with minimal luck.
I learned that week that people want somewhere to provide a "social media experience" as it were, but what I got from her is there was a much higher expectation of privacy and control of who got access than she was experiencing.
She still "checks it" occasionally to keep up with other members of the family, but I"m happy to say, she's much more satisfied with how I streamlined her email client than what she gets out of her Facebook account.
I don't know if it'll work for anyone else. She was already only tentatively dipping into the platform as it was, so it just may not have taken as much convincing to get the dots connected. Hell, it may not have been anything I said about it, but just that it disturbed/stressed me out so much that did it.
But nevertheless, I got Gram to back slowly away from Facebook. That means I've at least convinced one person. Should get easier from there right?